


The Little Things

by thesignsofserbia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angry John, Depression, Domestic, Gen, Great Hiatus, Lonely Sherlock, M/M, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, POV Sherlock Holmes, Pining Sherlock, Post-Reichenbach, Reunions, Sherlock Holmes Returns after Reichenbach, Sherlock Holmes and Feelings, Sherlock Misses John, Sherlock is Alone, co-dependancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 12:30:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4564716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesignsofserbia/pseuds/thesignsofserbia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The little things are what stop him short, and sometimes, they are the ones that make the greatest impact.</p><p>There is no one to buy the milk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Little Things

**Author's Note:**

> Sherlock dealing with John not welcoming him home when he gets back to London.

 

There is no one to buy the milk.

  
That's what upsets him the most.

  
Sherlock finds that he still calls out to him for the most mundane reasons. It happens when he forgets, and assumes, like he always had, that John will always be there.

  
Even after he remembers, sometimes he still waits for a reply.

  
It’s just habit, muscle memory, and he tells himself this more than once, but his chest twinges every time.

  
He is disoriented to come out of his mind palace to find that hours have passed unnoticed, or that it has gone dark on him, and with no frame of reference the pit of his stomach drops out with uncertainty, just for a split second the world is roaring in his ears.

  
_Where is he? What’s happened? Is he safe? **Where’s John?**_

  
He gets the distinct feeling of being exposed, having no idea how long he’s been away from reality or what he might have missed with no one to interrupt or scold him.

  
He never realised how much he’d taken for granted even the annoying things his flatmate did; things that unbeknownst to him, were in fact, his very moorings. He hadn’t seen it at the time, but he was now beginning to understand that these little undertakings had actually been extremely beneficial to him all along, rather than petty inconveniences he’d taken them for.

  
Ironically, the absence of these disruptions was more disrupting than they had ever been in the first place. He has lost his stabilisers, and now he muddles through; lurching, stalling, and tilting his way through life in the smallest of ways. It’s all but invisible to those around him, but he feels the effects keenly; he’s undeniably off kilter without his surefooted Army Doctor to smooth the way for him.

  
The milk always seems to have expired, as he rarely remembers to replace it, and it apparently needs to be done far more regularly than he’d previously thought. Not that he ever really _had_ thought about it, but it becomes an excessively persistent thorn in his side, how does J...how does everyone stay on top of it all? Especially when one has far more important and interesting things to think about?

  
It was never his job to buy the milk, and it hurts him that he needs to. He doesn’t want to because he shouldn’t _have_ to, it wasn’t his job. It’s the principal of the thing.

  
But now he has no one else who will do it, and he fights it, but for some reason that makes him desperately sad.

  
_He has no one._

  
He has to waste valuable cognitive function on the exhausting tedium of everyday life. He's bored to tears and so frustrated he wants to bang his head against a wall.

  
He once had a buffer, something to shield him from the dull, and the monotonus, redirecting and delegating them away, somewhere, _anywhere_ else but here.

  
He once had the privilege of not bothering about any of it, simply allowing all of his energy to flow freely into more productive outlets, and oh; how he missed that luxury now.

  
He should have appreciated it more.

  
He should have appreciated _him_ more.

  
Now his days consisted of getting bogged down with the nitty gritty responsibilities of the rest of the world, and it’s _awful_ , not to mention undignified. He's normal, he does normal things, and frankly he's shit at it.

  
But it’s not just him being put out about having to do the chores, it’s _everything_. He's trying to ignore what is obviously wrong, but these little things are what force him to face the facts, every day; it is _precisely_ because they have no milk that he cannot ignore it.

  
Existing at 221B without anyone else to share the space with is strange, he's comfortable with living alone, but he's no used to doing so here. The emptiness holds a different meaning now. He's still surprised when he wanders into the kitchen in the morning and is not greeted by the sounds and smells of a morning routine. He doesn't know how to go about life in his own home, not here, not when he's all on his own. He keeps saying they, it's not his flat, it's not his home; it's theirs, and it always will be. Which is exactly the problem.

  
Now he has to reassimilate with society and every second of it is grating agony, aggressively scouring at his nerves.

  
It’s difficult, this ‘functioning normally’ thing; readjusting to being just another body in a crowd, and interacting with the brain-dead mob without committing multiple homicide, or suffering a fully-fledged psychotic break takes all of his mental discipline. He’s managed not to resort to physical violence thus far, which he considers a personal triumph.

  
He tries very, very hard to be okay with the fact that he now _must_ bother with them, to act as if it’s not a big deal that he has to adapt, to learn to live life in an entirely new way.

  
They’re just insignificant little errands, people do them every day, lots of people live alone, they buy their own milk; it’s fine, he’s lived without a flatmate for almost his entire life, he _likes_ living on his own, damn it.

  
He tells himself that.

  
But he doesn’t.

  
He _hates_ this.

  
He’s resigned to this; Sherlock accepts that buying the milk is just another part of life now. But he’ll never be skilled at it, and he sure as hell will never enjoy it; it never won’t bore him until he wants to gouge his eyes from their very sockets.

  
This is very much not his division; housework, finances, shopping, and he never gets it right. Truthfully, he’s a walking disaster.

  
He is not above doing it, it's just a shock to suddenly have to. He doesn't like to focus on the real reason he's opposed to a bit of cleaning; it's the reality of what he has lost.

  
It all goes spectacularly wrong far more frequently than it does otherwise, and on one mortifying occasion, when he got home from a case for which he hadn’t slept in three days, he found a week’s worth of used dishes waiting for him in the sink. Inexplicably and without warning, the weight of it all had come crashing down.

  
It's almost unthinkable, that a bit of washing up could bring Sherlock Holmes nearly to tears, but then the milk was expired, so it had come closer than he’ll admit to being a reality.

  
He will _attempt_ to do the groceries, struggling to come up with a list of items he needs, what food does one buy? It's not like he doesn't try exactly, more like he doesn't have the first clue how to go about it because he deleted it. He inevitably forgets something important, an item that he’d never think to get because it’s _him_ and he doesn’t _do_ this. Except apparently now he _does_.

  
It’s too much of an alien environment, the sensory input of the general public, it feels like someone is dragging him across gravel, the lights are too bright, the choices too plentiful, volume too loud and piercing to tune out, endless distractions, things to deduce.

  
He can’t maintain concentration on one thing for more than thirty seconds, and his overstimulated brain feels like it’s going to vomit, like it’s been poisoned, or is overdosing, needing to purge the excess information that he can’t possibly process.

  
He spends 20 minutes swearing at margarine, accidentally purchases 4 sheep livers (coerced from the horrified youth in the butchers section), hospital grade bleach, an apple (singular), apricot jam, and a packet of chocolate biscuits.

  
He forgets the tea, the bread, a new set of drinking glasses (he hurled ever glass item they owned at the kitchen floor in a furious meltdown), Mrs Hudson’s yoghurt, and the washing powder, of which they have none, since he used it all in an experiment the week before. He is forced to go out and buy new pants and socks.

  
He also forgets the milk.

  
He locks himself in his room for two hours afterwards in fastidious silence until he has recovered enough to function again.

  
How can someone so clever be so _completely useless_ at the same time?

  
It’s so draining, every time he leaves to flat to attempt a feat of this kind, he has to clamp down on his swelling aggravation at every little aspect of life, opting for murderous stares instead to keep the world at bay, keeping his jaw clamped firmly shut.

  
Sherlock curses himself when he manages to go and faint halfway up the stairs, spraining his wrist in the process, all because he’d forgotten that biology dictated that he actually does need to eat and sleep occasionally. No one had been there to remind him.

  
It takes him exactly 12 minutes and 18 seconds to recover, sitting shakily on the landing until the ringing in his ears fades, and he can manage to stay upright long enough to make it to the flat.

  
It is utterly pathetic.

  
He was not built for this and how the hell did he cope before?

  
He forgets, even though he knows. He’ll pose a question to an empty room before he notices, and then the room is _too_ empty. It shouldn’t be empty at all, but it will remain that way regardless.

  
He does occupy the room so technically it isn’t entirely void of life, but it feels that way, and the dead pot plant (that Sherlock didn't know even existed) no longer counts.

  
He doesn’t have the first clue how the oven functions because he’d never needed to before and he doesn’t really _want_ to.

  
It’s not laziness per se; he just doesn’t want to _have_ to know.

  
He mostly has toast and take-out when he does actually eat, instead of putting it off to the point where he goes and collapses.

  
The bathroom, as it turns out, does not clean itself. For some reason, it hadn't occurred to him that he’d have to do it, because it hadn’t occurred that his friend wouldn’t be here. Sherlock had also assumed that Mrs Hudson was the one who tackled the hoovering, and he was wrong again.

  
_Never make assumptions without the facts._

  
No one will accommodate for his eccentricities, nag him constantly but still put up with all of his bullshit. No one's going to humour him and do the shopping.

  
He’s on his own now.

  
_It’s terrifying._

  
He's always prided himself on his independence, despite Mycroft being a git, but he's gotten too comfortable relying on having someone else there to do it.

  
He's spent the last two years having to do absolutely everything himself, and he'd come home hoping to go back to being willfully ignorant, only to have the rug pulled out from under his feet. He can survive perfectly fine on the streets, on the run, constantly in danger, when he has to. But put him in Tesco's at home, in London for the day to day stuff, and he hasn't got a clue.

  
He experiments with watching crap tv, because that’s what _they_ did, and because he’s grasping at straws, hoping to find some semblance of normality in Eastenders or some American chat show.

It doesn't work, he can't stand it, it's not just mildly vexing, it's awful, everything about it irritates him, and there is no one to laugh at his disgusted commentary. There is zero warmth or comfortable atmosphere to justify sitting through it, so he doesn’t even last 45 minutes. He must not be doing it correctly.

  
Mrs Hudson takes pity on him at first and helps out a bit, making a point to pop up at least twice a week, but he doesn’t like her commiserating with him, or the sad smiles.

  
She forgets to ask if he needs any milk.

  
It’s the things that should be insignificant that catch him off guard; stark reminders that there is a fundamental element of the flat’s atomic structure that is missing. The little things are what stop him short, and sometimes they are the ones that make the greatest impact.

  
A mug, still in the sink from the night before, it should have been washed, and normally it would have been; just not by him.

  
There is only one toothbrush on the counter.

  
They have three jars of apricot jam; Sherlock doesn’t like apricot, so it doesn't get eaten.

  
There's a battered oatmeal jumper, slung over the back of the armchair, left where its owner discarded it. He tries not to look at it, but sometimes it catches his eye.

  
There are lots of things in the pantry that he doesn’t know what to do with, and there never seems to be anything appetising there, even though it’s _him_ who buys the fucking stuff. What the _hell_ is he even supposed to _do_ with things like basil pesto, curry powder, chicken stock, or _bloody_ mushrooms?!

  
Sherlock can’t stand the things.

  
It wasn't _him_ who loved them.

  
He throws the mushrooms out of the front window, and gets irrationally angry every time he sees the damn things after that.

  
He finds some very old spring onion that he _definitely_ did not buy in the crisper, and just stares at it blankly for a full minute, before it meets the same fate as the mushrooms.

  
Too many unopened envelops litter the mantle, too many to jack-knife in place. How did they accumulate so quickly? And what was he supposed to do with them all? He probably wouldn’t be able to get away with ignoring them and hoping the problem would simply go away.

  
Taking the initiative to take care of simple tasks such as adjusting the heating, lighting a fire, opening a window, without fond nagging was a foreign concept to him. So they never even cross his mind until they become pressing enough that they require his immediate attention, like say when there is frost outside and the heating is on its lowest setting, or he chain-smokes without opening a window and the fire alarm blows a gasket.

  
He could do all of these things if he put his mind to it, he just never thinks to do it.

  
The fact that there is no one to buy the milk is a symbol of the massive black hole slowly consuming his life, all the empty spaces.

  
No one had ever been the person in Sherlock’s life who bought the milk before, and now there may never be again. No one else will be that person for him.

  
He leaves the stove lit under the kettle accidentally one day when he goes out. Luckily Mrs Hudson is home to catch it, because he shot the fire alarm after the chain-smoking incident.

  
Sherlock forgets that he actually has to pay rent, and belatedly races down, waking Mrs Hudson up at 5am to try and pay what he owes her right there and then, only to find that Mycroft has been taking care of it the whole time. He’s too relieved to give a damn about his brother’s prying; it’s just one more thing he doesn’t have to worry about.

  
Sherlock doesn’t buy the milk anymore, he doesn't like looking at it, and it just goes off anyway. He starts taking his tea black.

  
Most of the time he's very busy trying _not_ to think about it ( _Him)._

  
Sleep became less boring around the fourth time that sleep deprivation rendered him too weak to stand.

  
There’s no one to talk to so he doesn't say much. It bothers Mrs Hudson.

  
When he wasn’t working, there had always been black spells, but now there are also sobering moments of just…nothingness, when he hasn’t the first idea what to do with himself.

  
He sits and stares at the empty chair across from him until the silence becomes so loud it hurts.

  
When it builds up to be too much, he has to admit it, if just to himself;

  
Sherlock misses John.

  
Sherlock misses John like someone with an immune deficiency misses having leukocytes.

  
Sherlock misses John like a homeless man misses socks.

  
Sherlock misses John like an amputee longs for their missing limb.

  
Sherlock misses John more now than he missed John when he was away.

  
Sherlock misses John; his doctor.

  
Sherlock misses John; his colleague.

  
Sherlock misses John; his blogger.

  
Sherlock misses John; his flatmate.

  
Sherlock misses John; his only friend.

  
Sherlock misses John Hamish Watson.

  
Sherlock misses everything about him, even the things that drove him mad about the man. He misses all the little things he used to do for Sherlock, before he faked his death, before he lied and lied, before he tore their friendship, and his own life, to shreds.

  
Sherlock misses that John cared.

  
Sherlock is splitting apart at the seams.

  
So when a key turns in the lock, and the uneven gait of a man with a psychosomatic limp carrying a heavy suitcase graces the stairs, and could Sherlock cry from relief, because finally; there’s someone to buy the milk.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Edited because it sounded way too pretentious.


End file.
